I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but college is pretty expensive these days. In response, some state legislatures have begun advocating for reforms and budget cuts. These reforms and universities’ responses to such changes are examined in Starving the Beast. While the film mostly pulls off explaining such a complicated issue, the film itself feels a bit heavy and difficult to follow, due more to its subject matter than the style of filming.
In the last eight years, state legislatures have been targeting public universities for reform. These reforms mostly revolve around regarding students as customers and professors as salespeople. This means many things, but essentially it results in shifting away from the long-held belief that universities were meant to create life-long learners and educated citizens of tomorrow. A more intangible goal than making sure students gets their dollar’s worth.
Directed by Steve Mims, a Lecturer in Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin, Starving the Beast examines these reforms through factual interviews with major players on both sides of the argument. The film primarily focuses on UT Austin, which makes sense as Mims works there and has witnessed first hand the reforms and political fights between the (now) former president of the university, Bill Powers, and Wallace Hall, a Regent of UT Austin appointed by then-Governor Rick Perry.
The film is thorough in its examination, diving deep to reveal political motivations intertwined with the proposed reforms while still boiling down the issue to two main sides. Are students to be regarded as future citizens or straightforward customers? It’s an identity crisis that universities have never had to deal with. Thanks to interviews with Bill Powers, Larry Faulkner and Gene Nichols as well as important figures like Wallace Hall and Jeff Sandefer, you get to hear opinions from both sides. Add some star power from James Carville and you’ve got yourself an incredibly watchable documentary.
It is fascinating to see politicians chastising universities on one hand for raising tuition while heavily slashing their allocations for the same universities every year. Mims points out that this particular problem has been plaguing higher education for over 30 years, since budget allocations for universities hit an all-time high in 1980 and have been dropping ever since. It’s clear that as impartial as Mims strives to be, as a faculty member himself he seems to agree that universities are measured more in intangibles than tangible charts and numbers.
Starving the Beast is an informative look at how higher education is changing and being challenged by politicians insistent on radical reforms. Even though the film is incredibly dense with information, Mims does a fair job presenting everything in a sparse, take-as-you-will format that (if nothing else) will leave you more knowledgeable on the current climate in higher education than when you first sat down to watch the film.
